Although it takes lots of time for history to sort itself out — who knows what the verdict on the Clinton Era will be 100 years from now? — William L. O’Neill’s new book “A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001” (Ivan R. Dee) gives a reader the chance to time travel back to a wild era that can seem somewhat carefree in the aftermath of 9/11 and last year’s financial collapse.
O’Neill mixes the high and low aspects of recent history — a chapter on the creation of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is sandwiched between an account of the Navy’s Tailhook sex scandal and a long account of the “trial of the century” (the O.J. Simpson case).
The author writes in his preface, “The 1990s ended only a short time ago, yet the decade seems far away, a happier and more prosperous age unmarred by terrorist attacks, long inconclusive struggles abroad, contempt for human and individual rights at home, botched disaster-recovery attempts, and a government whose arrogance was exceeded only by its ineptitude.”
O’Neill is far from a Clinton apologist — the Monica-gate scandal is recounted in such a way as to heighten the personal sleaziness of the ex-president — but the author sees Clinton’s successor in a very cold light. Noting that he tried to avoid facile comparisons between Clinton and Bush II, the historian notes, “…(If) Bush II becomes the yardstick by which earlier presidents are measured, they will all look great, going back to and including Herbert Clark Hoover.”
The highly readable style of “A Bubble in Time” reminded me of Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Only Yesterday,” a classic pop history of the 1920s written in 1931. I didn’t read the Allen book until I was in college and it made the 1920s come alive for me in a way that no other book or film did.
Writing a book about a decade while it is still fresh in one’s memory has some advantages over long-after-the-fact tomes that might exclude ephemeral pop cultural events that help to define a time as well as “important” news stories that are almost instantly forgotten.
(Do you remember why the photo above ran on page one in every newspaper in the country on April 23, 2000? O’Neill includes a full account of the politically-motivated hysteria in Florida over a Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez, a news story that was almost immediately consigned to the dustbins of history.)
A distressing theme running through the book involves the rise of what O’Neill calls “Tabloid Nation,” the evolution of news into entertainment as a result of the 24/7 cable news cycle and the rise of the internet. O’Neill points out that public knowledge of politics and social issues declined during the 1990s in spite of more hours devoted to so-called “news” on TV.
The book takes us back to 1994 when Republican approval ratings soared during Clinton’s second year in the White House: “A big problem for the Democrats had to do with the public’s invincible ignorance. Almost three-quarters of those polled got their news exclusively from TV broadcasts, to which they evidently paid little attention. As an instance, more people thought Clinton had increased the budget deficit than believed he had lowered it, though he had reduced the shortfall by almost a third, from $290.4 billion in fiscal 1992 to $203.4 billion in fiscal 1994.”
